The Living

by Matt De La Peña

  “Come on, Shy,” Carmen said.

  Shy looked down at the beach. They had a perfect view from the top of the stairs. The passengers were all lined up and the research people were walking around them wearing backpacks. Green ones. Just like the one Bill had been wearing. The wrecked sailboat was gone. He thought about Shoeshine telling him to stay off the ship. Maybe he was saying for them to never get on the ship. Maybe it was a warning.

  “Everyone’s lined up already,” Carmen said. “We gotta get down there.”

  “Let’s go, man,” Marcus said, trying to pull Shy by the wrist.

  “Hold up,” Shy said, yanking his arm free. “I gotta think.” He was remembering something else now: Shoeshine pulling the spray bottle out of Bill’s backpack, smelling the substance on the back of his hand. And the researchers he’d seen on the path, spraying the bushes and trees with this same kind of spray bottle.

  “Shy!” Carmen shouted.

  “We can’t go down there,” he said, looking up at her. “Not yet. We got time, right? They still gotta get the sick people on.”

  They all turned to the water when two motorized rafts started buzzing toward shore from the ship. The drivers steered the rafts right up onto the golf-course grass and gave the researchers on land a thumbs-up.

  “Look,” Marcus said. “You can hang around up here if you want, but I’m getting my ass on one of those rafts. Now.” He turned to Carmen. “You coming with me?”

  Carmen looked back at Shy with sad eyes. “I just wanna go home,” she told him.

  “Me too,” Shy said, wiping a hand down his face. “But something’s not right.”

  Shy moved closer to the edge of the cliff near the stairs when he heard one of the researchers start shouting orders. He watched over a dense wall of bushes. Instead of loading the first group of survivors onto the first raft, the team of researchers all reached into their green backpacks at the same time and pulled out machine guns. They aimed them at the line of survivors and started firing.

  Screams filled the air.

  The quick rattle of gunfire.

  A few of the passengers tried to run, but no one made it more than a few steps before getting shot.

  Shy ducked behind the edge of the cliff, pulling in quick breaths. Carmen and Marcus hurried back up the stairs and dove in behind him.

  He watched horrified as body after body fell limp onto the putting green and the screams became fewer until there was nothing left but the sound of gunfire and nobody remained standing other than the researchers, who were not researchers at all but LasoTech security, just like Shy feared.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God,” Carmen kept chanting in Shy’s ear.

  Marcus only stared, his eyes bugged, mouth hanging open in shock.

  Shy’s heart pounded in his chest. He couldn’t move. The men were now piling dead bodies onto the rafts, and several men on the ship were positioning two rocket launchers so they were aimed back at the island. Another man was lighting all the lifeboats on fire so there would be no way to escape the island. When he was done, he pointed up at the stairs and shouted something back at his guys, and soon two other men were raising their guns toward Shy, Marcus and Carmen and firing.

  Shy ducked behind the tram and pulled Carmen and Marcus down with him, and the three of them held each other, trembling, as shots ricocheted all around them. Some continued on toward the hotel, causing mini-explosions in the walls and sparking fires. The trees and bushes were catching fire, too, and Shy immediately connected it with the substance in the spray bottles.

  The gunfire lasted nearly a full minute, and when it let up for a few seconds, Shy lifted his head over the lip of the wall and saw that two of the gunmen were bounding up the stairs toward them.

  “They’re coming!” Shy shouted, grabbing Carmen and Marcus by the backs of their shirts and yanking them to their feet. In seconds they were in a full sprint past the hotel and the gazebo, back up the trail, and all Shy could hear was bullets ripping through the bushes and trees around them and the muted sounds of their footfalls as they climbed higher up the cliffs.

  Seconds later the gunfire stopped and Marcus shouted: “They’re leaving!”

  Shy and Carmen stopped running, too, and spun around to watch the gunmen hurrying back down the trail, away from them. Shy pulled in desperate breaths next to Carmen and Marcus, who were both leaning over, hands on knees.

  “Where are they going?” Marcus said between breaths.

  Shy shook his head. He couldn’t comprehend any of it. Not the slaying of the survivors or the chase up the hill or why they’d just stopped and turned around. But he knew it wasn’t over.

  Many of the trees and bushes down the hill were in flames, which lit up the darkening sky.

  The three of them waited in silence.

  “I’ll go look,” Shy said.

  “You’re staying right here!” Carmen said, latching herself on to his arm. “What if they’re waiting for us?”

  “We have to help the sick people,” Shy said.

  Marcus was shaking his head. “Let’s get off the trail. Maybe we’ll be able to see the ship from the edge of the cliff.”

  They stepped off the trail together, Shy leading the way, until they were at the edge of the cliff, where they looked out over the ocean. Their angle was poor, but Shy saw one of the rafts at the side of the ship, and the researchers pulling the dead bodies up into the ship. They didn’t want to leave any evidence of what they’d done.

  “Where’s Shoeshine?” Shy asked.

  No one answered.

  As soon as the last of the bodies was loaded onto the ship, the gunmen climbed aboard, too, and then a group of them pulled the rafts up.

  “They’re all on,” Shy said. “We have to go get the sick people out of the hotel and down to the beach. Part of the hotel is already on fire.”

  Just after he said these words a ball of fire shot across the water from the ship and crashed into the side of the hotel, and the wall exploded in flames.

  More thunderous shots came from the ship, the sound exploding all around the island, the hotel taking blow after blow until the whole thing was in flames, including the penthouse where some of the patients had still been alive. Shy had never seen anything like it. The men were firing rocket launchers at the island, trying to burn everything down. He was choking on fear now.

  They started running again, back down the trail, Shy leading with no idea where he was going. But then a ball of fire landed in the brush right in front of them and without saying a word all three of them spun back around and took off, back up the hill.

  Every other tree and bush they passed was on fire, the flames leaping from branch to branch, reaching into the sky, lighting up everything. Smoke blanketed the path, and soon they were all coughing and covering their mouths with their shirts. There was nowhere to go, no safe place. They were going to be burned alive with everything else.

  Suddenly, another man came ripping through a patch of burning bushes and fell to the ground, rolling to put out the flames on his clothes. Then he sprang to his feet.

  Shoeshine.

  “It’s napalm!” he shouted. “They’re torching the entire island! Follow me!”

  Shy sprinted after Shoeshine, Carmen and Marcus right behind him. They took the trail up the hill, fire spreading all around them.

  Shy couldn’t think, but he could run. And he was hyperaware of his surroundings. The flames and the smoke and each twist and turn Shoeshine made and Carmen and Marcus running behind him.

  But the farther up the trail they went, the more it became clear to him that they would be trapped. The only way down from the towering cliff was the stairs, where they’d be in clear sight of the men on the ship. But the rest of the island would soon be engulfed in flames. There was no way out.

  Shoeshine led them off the path, toward the edge of the cliff, and Shy recognized the helicopter launchpad. It was where he’d slipped and almost fallen. The four of them stood at the very edge an
d stared down at the water some sixty feet below, the fire already pushing up against their backs.

  “What now?” Shy shouted.

  Shoeshine grabbed the radio out of Marcus’s hands and the duffel bag off Shy’s shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” Marcus shouted.

  “I’ve got it!” Shoeshine shouted back, shoving the radio inside the duffel and zipping up. He then leaned into Shy’s ear and told him: “You make sure they follow.”

  He turned and leaped over the edge, throwing the duffel out in front of him.

  Carmen screamed as the three of them scrambled to the edge to watch Shoeshine falling feetfirst, arms and legs flailing, until his body exploded into the water.

  “No way,” Marcus said, shaking his head. “No fucking way.”

  Shy glanced at the flames surrounding them.

  There was no choice.

  He moved toward Marcus, holding up his hands and saying: “We don’t have to jump. We can just go back down the trail—” Then he shoved Marcus, as hard as he could, off the cliff, watched him fall screaming toward the water.

  Shy took Carmen’s hand and looked at her.

  Her face was contorted with fear but she nodded to him, and they both took two hurried steps toward the edge and leaped together.

  In the air, Shy reached out for nothing with his arms and kicked, the air whipping past his ears and the lost feeling of weightlessness and freedom, and he saw the comb-over man falling from the ship and he saw Carmen’s bugged eyes beside him and then he smacked into the water and sank down into it, deeper and deeper, even when he fought to stop himself, and then he let his body go limp and the water wrapped its arms around him and lifted him back up toward the surface, slowly and steadily, and he fought his burning lungs, waiting until he burst back through the surface to suck in a huge breath, and then he spun around in the water, desperately, until he found Carmen staring back at him.

  50

  Five Knots

  “Over here,” Shoeshine said, waving for them to follow him. He was in the water with the duffel bag, against the cliff.

  Shy’s entire right side was numb where he’d slammed into the ocean. And his mind was numb, too. He saw Carmen and Marcus swimming up ahead of him. And he saw the sailboat with the torn sail floating off to the right. The one Carmen claimed Shoeshine had been obsessed with. It seemed impossible that he’d gotten it to the point that it could float again. But here it was.

  Shoeshine was slowly climbing up the rocky cliff now, which didn’t seem like a good idea since the entire island was still engulfed in flames.

  By the time Shy got to the cliff, he saw that Shoeshine was crawling toward a cave in the side of the cliff, about fifteen feet above the water. Shoeshine reached down for Carmen and helped her into the cave. Then he helped Marcus. Shy climbed up after them and Shoeshine pulled him up and in as well. Inside, the cave opened up much wider. Shoeshine walked over to a pile of life jackets, tossed one to each of them, saying: “You’re gonna need these.” They all strapped the jackets on. Then Shoeshine lifted a large folded blanket.

  “What are we doing?” Carmen said.

  “Getting on that sailboat out there,” Shoeshine said.

  Shy was shivering as he turned to the water again.

  “We can’t!” Marcus shouted. “The ship’s moving toward it!”

  They all rushed to the cave opening and looked out, saw a ball of fire screaming through the air, toward the boat. It landed only fifteen feet away and quickly died in the water.

  “They’re trying to burn it down!” Carmen shouted.

  Shoeshine leaned out of the cave and shouted at the research ship: “Come on, you bastard! Just get up to five knots!”

  Another fireball fell short of the boat.

  Then a third.

  Shy watched the ship start gaining momentum toward the boat and he watched the balls of fire continue arcing through the air toward it. One landed right next to the boat, nearly turning it on its side. The fire jumped up and set the tattered sail ablaze.

  “Come on!” Shoeshine shouted. “Speed up for me!”

  Above them, Shy heard the earth-shaking sound of fire sweeping over the island. He was so confused. “Why do you want it to speed up?” he said.

  “I spent all afternoon rigging the damn thing. Just in case.”

  Carmen slid up next to Shy to watch the ship bearing down on the helpless sailboat.

  Another fireball missed, and then the research ship itself exploded in a burst of flames that shot into the sky. A second explosion followed on the back half of the ship and pieces of it blew out in every direction, some of them landing as far as the mouth of their cave.

  The three of them looked at Shoeshine all bug-eyed as Shoeshine nodded calmly.

  “What the hell happened?” Carmen asked.

  “I rigged their own explosives to the ship’s propeller,” Shoeshine said. “Soon as it got to five knots she was gonna blow.”

  “So you knew they were gonna kill everyone here?” Marcus said.

  Shoeshine shook his head. “Just knew it wasn’t a research ship.” He looked out over the water, at what was left of the ship. “Didn’t set the trigger, though, until I realized they were aiming to torch the island.”

  “What if we had all gotten on the ship?” Carmen asked.

  “I would have disarmed it.”

  They all stared at Shoeshine in awe.

  “Jesus, dude,” Marcus said. “Who are you?”

  “A guy who shines shoes,” Shy interjected, recalling all the times he’d asked the exact same question.

  Shoeshine grinned at him and added: “May have spent some time in the military, too. Special ops.”

  Shy turned with everyone else to watch the flames continue to engulf the decimated ship, lighting up the sky. And they watched the shadow of the flames on the island, flickering against the water in front of their cave.

  Shoeshine pointed to the sad-looking sailboat sitting a hundred yards to the right of the burning ship. “You all ready for another swim?” he asked, tossing the duffel back to Shy.

  They all nodded and Shoeshine picked up the folded blanket and let himself drop from the cave back into the water.

  Shy slung the bag over his shoulder and followed right behind him.

  Day 8

  51

  The Living

  Shy awoke early the next morning on the ragged sailboat, trembling and in a mental haze. So much had happened the day before he could hardly formulate a coherent thought. And he couldn’t speak. Nobody could. He reached into the duffel and pulled out the comb-over man’s letter and read every word of it, over and over. It was so crushing, though, he had to eventually put it away and stop thinking about it. He looked around instead, taking in his surroundings.

  They hadn’t gone very far over the course of the night. Only a few hundred yards away from the island. Shoeshine had stripped the tattered sail from the boat and was just starting to replace it with a different one. What Shy had thought was a blanket the night before was actually a sail the man must have been piecing together out of random scraps since landing on the island. He hadn’t finished until right before Shy awoke, like maybe he’d been up the entire night.

  Marcus was at the front of the boat with the radio. He had it coming in a little more clearly now, and Shy was able to make out many of the words. The reporter was talking about a makeshift border that had been erected in America. The earthquakes had caused the disease to spread so rapidly among the western states, people were no longer allowed to travel east, in hopes of keeping the disease contained. The coasts of California and Oregon and Washington were essentially giant quarantine areas for now, until scientists could develop a vaccine and replenish the medication used to treat the disease, which they’d already exhausted. A number of pharmaceutical companies were working day and night, trying to develop a vaccine, but so far none of them had had any luck.

  Shy clutched the duffel bag in his lap. He understood
they’d have to get it to the right people as soon as possible. Thousands of lives probably depended on it.

  He remembered the last time he was on the sea in a boat, gripping the duffel bag. He’d been with Addie. He thought about how they’d spent nights close to each other for warmth, and how they sometimes talked. He could still see her splitting that fish in half with her bare hands. Could still hear her whispering in his ear that last night.

  Where was she now?

  Did he even care?

  He was convinced that when he last saw her, she already knew she was going to leave the island in the helicopter with her old man. It was the look in her eyes when they talked after the lunch meeting. And the things she had said. And that kiss on the cheek. She was telling him goodbye.

  But the more Shy thought about it, the more he decided Addie hadn’t known anything when they were stranded together on the lifeboat. Back then she was just as confused as he was. He trusted what he’d seen in her eyes. Which meant her dad must have gotten to her on the island at some point.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter anymore. He was with Carmen now. She was sitting against the side of the boat right beside him, staring out at the wreckage from the ship, which floated all along the surface of the ocean. And they were holding hands—though he still wasn’t sure who’d initiated that part.

  Shy closed his eyes and breathed, feeling her hand in his. He understood it was a miracle they were even alive, but he wanted their families back home to be alive, too. He wanted everything to go back to the way it was.

  In a few minutes Shoeshine muttered from atop the forward hatch: “Believe I finally got it.” And he slowly began raising his homemade sail until it was all the way up and secured. The wind immediately caught it and started the boat moving through the ocean at a decent speed, farther away from the island. Shoeshine hopped down from the hatch and hurried around to the tiller, where he began steering, occasionally looking down at a homemade-looking compass.

  They all watched him and asked what they could do to help, but Shoeshine insisted that they just rest for now.